The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
A baseboard management controller (BMC) is a specialized service processor. This service processor monitors the physical state of a computer, network server or other hardware device using sensors and communicating with the system administrator through an independent connection. The BMC is part of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and is usually contained in the motherboard, baseboard, or main circuit board of the device to be monitored. Depending on the complexity of the motherboard, baseboard, or main circuit board of the device, the sensors installed on these boards can vary from very little to very large number. These sensors measure internal physical variables such as temperature, humidity, power-supply voltage, fan speeds, resource such as storage space usage, and memory usage, communications parameters and operating system (OS) functions. If any of these variables happens to stray outside predetermined ranges or limits, the administrator is notified. That person can then take corrective action by remote control through an independent communication channel. The monitored device can be power cycled or rebooted as necessary. In this way, a single administrator can remotely manage numerous servers and other devices simultaneously, saving on the overall operating cost of the network and helping to ensure its reliability.
Prior to the management of these BMC as well as the sensors on the BMC, the BMC management system must be configured. For example, the BMC management system must know the number of servers with BMC that are communicatively connected to the BMC management system and the number of sensors and sensor aggregators that are communicatively connected to each of the BMC. The BMC configuration can be very tedious and time consuming. Traditionally, the system administrator has to go through all BMC installed on each of the computer server or storage devices to complete the BMC configurations.
In certain data center, there are numerous similar or identical computer servers or storage devices mounted on one or more chasses. These computer servers, or storage devices may have same configurations and same number of sensors for monitoring the performance of the computer servers or storage devices. These computer servers or storage devices can be grouped into a number of clusters, each cluster having a number of same computer servers, or storage devices such that they have identical BMC configuration. For these computer servers or storage devices cluster, a simpler way to configure these same BMC can be devised to take advantage of such configuration and avoid repetitive tedious BMC configurations that are prone to human errors.
Therefore, heretofore unaddressed needs still exist in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.